Challah!

Challah is one of my favourite types of bread.  It makes great toast, french toast, sandwiches, garlic bread, croutons... it pretty much works for all your bready needs.  I've been meaning to try my hand at making it for a while now, but for some reason I thought it was super complicated and the recipe I have calls for saffron.

But today, I got past my mental challah block and dove in!  (Sans saffron)

Challah is actually an amazingly simple bread.  Even the braiding which makes it look so fancy is simple (we all know how to braid, right?)  And with a few birds in the yard, the number of eggs challah requires for its signature deliciousness is no obstacle!

Challah

1/2 c flour

2tbsp sugar

1 1/2 tsp salt

Whatever spice you want, however much you want (I used a healthy pinch of cinnamon)

1 packet or 2 1/4 tsp yeast

1/3 softened butter

Sift together dry ingredients and thoroughly mix in butter.

1 c water (105-115 F)

3 eggs

1 egg white (save yolk for later)

1/2 c flour

Add water to dry ingredients slowly while mixing - either by hand with a wooden spoon or with your electric mixer.   Add eggs and egg white.  While getting mixy, add flour.

More flour!

(about 4 c)

Continue mixing.  Add flour, 1/2 c at a time, until you have a good dough.  

Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until stretchy and smooth.  If you have a mixer with kneading hooks, use that, cause, way easier.  This will take around 10 minutes.

Grease a large bowl.  When dough is kneaded properly, place in greased bowl.  Roll dough around to ensure that all sides get greasy.  Cover and leave in a warm place.

Do something else for 1 hour.

After your hour is up, find your dough and punch it in the face a few times.  Split your dough in half  and flour a flat surface for some braiding fun!

Split half the dough further into thirds.  Roll each third out into a 12" long dough-string.  Braid them together and pinch together the ends.  Place your braided dough onto a greased cookie sheet and repeat this step with the second half of the dough.

1 egg yolk

1 tbsp cold water

Some kind of seeds - poppy, sesame, anise, whatevs. 

Beat the yolk and the cold water together.  Brush on the tops of your braids.  Sprinkle whatever seeds you chose on the top until it looks good to you.

Cover and leave in a warm place.

Walk your dog or something for another hour.

Preheat your oven to 400F.  Bake 20 minutes.  Remove from sheet and allow to cool on wire racks.  Share - or not, depending on how hungry you are.

Andama!

For a dinner party last night, I decided to make the last bread that my bread machine ruined: Andama. Judging from the amount of unsolicited compliments it received, it's official: Humans rule, Bread Machines drool.

Andama is a delicious easy way to use up that molasses that's been sitting in your cabinet for ages. This time my recipe came wholesale from McCall's Home Baked Breads, c1965, no changes or additions needed.

McCall's Andama

3/4 c boiling water
1/2 c yellow cornmeal
2 tsp salt
3 tsp butter
1/4 c molasses

First, lightly grease a loaf pan.

In the bowl you plan to be mixing in, mix boiling water, cornmeal, butter, molasses and salt. Stir until all melty and combined. Set aside and allow to cool to lukewarm.

1/4 c warm water (105-115 F)
1 pkg or 2 1/4 tsp yeast

Sprinkle yeast over warm water in a bowl or measuring cup. Stir until dissolved. Add to warm molasses mixture.

1 3/4 c sifted all-purpose flour
1 egg

Add flour and egg to yeasty molasses mix. With a wooden spoon or fancy mixer, stir until smooth.

1 c sifted all-purpose flour

Gradually add the rest of the flour while stirring. Continue mixing until dough is thick enough that it no longer sticks to the sides of the bowl.

Place dough in your pre-greased loaf pan, smoothing with a greased spatula (or your clean hands, like I did) so that it fills the pan evenly with the dough touching the sides of the pan Cover and place somewhere warm, like the oven with the light on.

Forget all about your bread for about 1 hour 30 minutes
(Or until double in bulk)

Sprinkle the top of your bread with salt and cornmeal.

Preheat oven to 375F

Bake 50 to 55 minutes, or until bread is solid enough to rap with your knuckles without giving.

Remove from pans immediately and cool on wire racks. Brush tops with butter (I used olive oil).

Eat as you will!

Nut Teas and Nutella

I've had a pretty bakey week. I didn't make any bread this weekend, because we're still working on that Spiced Honey Wheat Bread (another advantage of making it by hand over using a bread machine : 2 loaves!)

However, I volunteered to host the February board meeting of the Northwest History Network, which meant I had to bake to impress! Or, at least, I wanted to. So I made cookies: LeChuck Chips and Nut Teas. (Every battery in the house was dead, so no pictures. Sorry.)

LeChuck Chips (so named because when I first made them, I was playing a lot of Monkey Island) are basically Chocolate Chip cookies with coconut flakes added, and coconut extract instead of vanilla extract. One could go even further and use coconut oil instead of butter - but I'm much too cheap for that.

I found the recipe for Nut Teas in a cookbook by the Overlook Women's Club from the 1950s - although I can't imagine anyone thinking that "Nut Teas" was a good name for food back then either. The cookbook also didn't think it necessary to give many actual directions beyond a temperature and an ingredient list, but I managed to wing it ok:

Nut Teas
from the Overlook Cookbook ca. 1950
submitted by Mrs. G. A. Baley

1 c firmly packed brown sugar
1 c ground nuts (measure after grinding)
1 unbeaten egg white
pinch salt

Preheat oven to 275F. Mash lumps in brown sugar. Add egg and salt. Add nuts and form into balls. Bake 30 minutes.

What the recipe doesn't tell you is that since these cookies contain no butter and only egg whites, you need to be sure to heavily grease your cookie sheet and be VERY careful removing them after they're done. Make sure to allow them to cool completely on the sheets before chipping them carefully off. Several of mine fell apart because I didn't know this. But they were still delicious, and soon disappeared.

Since I used hazelnuts in the above recipe, and I had a great many of them all ground up and leftover, I decided to attempt to make my own nutella (Recipe found here).

Seen here on my delicious Spiced Honey Wheat Bread (now that batteries have been recharged):

Warning: if you attempt this at home, this recipe is a little too sweet for my taste. I'd recommend using more cocoa powder and less powdered sugar.

Rosemary Vinegar: Success

It's as delicious as it looks. Kind of sweet, actually. Which surprised me, but it shouldn't have, because I am a huge fan of the Rosemary Mochas from Pix Patisserie.

(For a few months I was adding rosemary to my coffee every morning, until I switched to cinnamon and nutmeg, until I switched to ginger, until I switched to cardamom, until I switch to roasting my own coffee).

In fact, I threw a splash of this vinegar into my morning coffee. Yum!

I'm sure this vinegar would also be excellent for marinades. I've yet to try making marinades with any of these vinegars, as I don't really cook meat all that much. But eventually I may try marinating some squash or tofu... What else does one marinade?

This was the last vinegar to be made this summer (my vinegar shelf is quite full now). I'm moving on to canning for the next few months (hmm... rosemary vinegar for pickling?).

In the meantime, here's my rosemary vinegar recipe (I don't remember where it came from):

A bunch of rosemary
White vinegar to cover

Wash rosemary and place in a tight-sealing jar. Cover with vinegar. Seal, and let steep in a sunny window for 6 to 8 weeks.

6 to 8 weeks later, strain contents into a saucepan and bring to a simmer (DO NOT BOIL) for 5 to 10 minutes. Allow to cool, then pour into a pretty bottle. If desired, place a sprig of rosemary in the bottle for extra pretty-ness and identification. A label works too.

Since rosemary is pretty much an evergreen (at least up to zone 9, such as Portland) you can gather enough herb to make this vinegar any time of year... although the sunny windowsill might be problematic for cloudier climes.

Lavender Vinegar: Success!

Sorry, no photo this time, Boyfriend has taken the digital camera with him on his Fabulous California NINJA tour.

A couple of days ago I decided that my lavender vinegar was ready to be strained and bottled, I didn't get around to testing this light purple concoction until today: YUMS.

If you've ever had anything lavender flavoured and enjoyed it, this is the vinegar for you. It's strongly flavoured (unlike the too-subtle Rose Vinegar), so the tart vinegar flavour takes a backseat to the taste of soothing lavender. I also took a little and mixed it in a bottle with distilled water (approximately 1:8) and put it in the bathroom for use as a toner, so I can be beautiful AND smell great (thus making me even more beautiful).

Lavender grows in great abundance pretty much everywhere. Around Portland, everyone has a bush or two in their yard, so harvesting is a cinch. I recommend using English Lavender for this recipe, as I believe it has the strongest aroma.

Recipe (taken and adapted from Tipnut, a fabulous site):

• Fill a jar with lavender (both flowers and stems)
• Pour white vinegar over top, seal jar and refrigerate
• Shake daily for two weeks
• Strain the vinegar and use

Next to be ready: Rosemary Vinegar.

I want to try making some mint vinegar too, but I've yet to find any recipes, so I'll have to make one up. However, I'm all out of white vinegar for now. Does anyone know where I can buy white vinegar in bulk (as in, bringing my own bottles)?

Rose Vinegar: Slightly Less Sucessful

This morning, I decided that the rose vinegar had been steeping on my windowsill long enough. I strained it and poured it into a fancy looking bottle, mixed a little bit with some water and ice, and gave it a taste.

I think this is a vinegar that needs to be used very sparingly. At first I put a wee splash in the glass, and I thought the flavour was too subtle. So I added a bigger splash, and the flavour gave me a headache.

However, the recipe I used said that rose vinegar can be used for marinades and cold compresses for headaches. Also, I used cheap distilled white vinegar. While the cheap stuff worked fine with the blackberries, the rose flavour isn't strong enough to overwhelm the vinegary-ness. Perhaps if one uses white wine vinegar, the whole thing would turn out much more refined. It's also possible that I used too much vinegar. Further experimentation is merited.

In the meantime, I intend to try making marinades with this batch. I also want to try adding it to hot black tea (when the weather cools down).

Here is the recipe I used, taken from Country Pickles and Preserves (one of the more useful preserving books I've used yet):

The petals of 6 roses (preferably red, cause, pretty)
1 pint white wine vinegar

Pull the petals from the roses and wash them. Snip away the bitter white part at the base of each petal. Put into a glass jar or bottle.

Scald the vinegar by heating it to just below boiling and allow to cool. Add the cooled vinegar to the jar of petals. Cover tightly and place in a sunny window for at least 3 weeks.

Try making your own. Let me know how it turns out!

Blackberry Vinegar: Success!

Yesterday evening, after a long hard day of bowling, I strained, decanted and sampled some of my freshly finished blackberry vinegar while attempting to watch last night's meteor shower.

While the Perseids were a bust, the blackberry vinegar was an explosion of tarty fruity refreshy-ness!

As promised, here is the recipe (taken and altered from Preserving Nature's Bounty.)

A whole bunch of blackberries, washed
Enough apple cider vinegar to cover them all

Place fruit in a non-reactive bowl (I used a ceramic casserole dish) and pour vinegar over them. Crush fruit with a potato masher to release the sweet sweet juices and leave, covered, for 48 hours. Strain through a cheesecloth (though I only have a sieve) and then decant into bottles. Cork and label the bottle. Enjoy!

A note: many recipes I've looked up warn to NOT use apple-cider FLAVOURED vinegar, but to use the real junk made from apples. I didn't realise until after I'd started this process that I have the cheap flavoured variety. While I'm sure my vinegar would have been even more delishuser with real apple cider vinegar, my cheap knock-off store brand didn't ruin anything.

New Obsession: Vinegar

So, a few months ago, boyfriend and I went into our favourite local Japanese bar (Miho Izakaya) and the fellow behind the counter said, "We've got some new drinking vinegars right now. Wanna try some?"

My brain said 'wtf? drinking vinegar?' My mouth said, "Hells yea!"

And.

It was delicious.

It was like drinking a cocktail, but slightly tart, and without a buzz. A much less embarrassing non-alcoholic drink to order than a Shirley Temple. In fact, I did some research (being an Information Professional), and it turns out that drinking vinegar cocktails, called Shrubs, was a huge trend among proponents of the Temperance Movement about 100 years ago. I'm against prohibition of any sort, but temperance is something I can get behind.

So, being crafty and thrifty, I've been frantically making tasty vinegars of my own to put into Shrubs using whatever is growing around my neighborhood. So far I have some Rose Vinegar and Rosemary Vinegar steeping in the sunshine on a windowsill, some Lavender Vinegar chilling in my fridge, and some Blackberry Vinegar hanging out in a covered container on my kitchen counter. If any of them turn out well, I'll share a few recipes.

In the meantime, I've been daily enjoying some Coconut Lime Shrubs:

1 pint glass
1/2 ounce Coconut Vinegar
a splash of Lime Juice
3 ice cubes
Fill the rest of the way with distilled water or soda water.

Refreshing!